It's everybody's job: Building a culture of accessibility

For many organizations, accessibility is still largely about legal compliance - a checklist that's completed at the end of a project, or worse, avoided entirely by using an inadequate accessibility overlay. What happens when organizations shift left and think about accessibility from a project's inception? What can we gain when everyone feels encouraged to contribute to accessibility work, regardless of whether they can recite the WCAG guidelines from memory? How do design approaches change when accessibility is at top of mind, rather than an afterthought?

This session will cover some of the interventions that have been successful in the speaker's work context supporting an enterprise-level government web ecosystem. Beyond brass-tacks design and code strategies, there are cultural and functional interventions that can help build a community of practice, where every member of the team weaves accessibility thinking into their work throughout the project lifecycle.